Today, March 17, is a day many people celebrate Irish heritage, and it’s a difficult day for me. I am of Irish patrilineal descent, and Latinx matrilineal descent, and I often have felt those two sides were at war. Both of my parents were working-class children of immigrants, but the way they experienced being immigrants was very different. While I have written on my Latinx heritage, it is much harder for me to unpack my Irish heritage story, especially because of how strongly it’s tied to my father’s white supremacy, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and anti-AAPI racism.
Anti-AAPI Violence in Georgia
I began drafting this post before the news broke of the hate-motivated murders of six Asian-American women, along with two other victims, in Georgia by a white male suspect on March 16, 2021. Yet these eight murders made publishing about racism within my own family history even more urgent. The common threads that ties these two things together, my own immigrant heritage, and anti-AAPI hate violence, is how immigrants in the United States have historically been marginalized and pitted against each other, especially through what’s often referred to as the “model minority” myth. Immigrants who divorce themselves from their culture and language, adopt dominant American culture, achieve capitalist success, and are complicit with white supremacism, or at least don’t speak out against racism, are often nominally accepted in society and looked as “model minorities.” Those immigrants who don’t live up to these dehumanizing and often unattainable ideals face intense marginalization, including hate-motivated violence and xenophobia.
The “model minority” framework is commonly associated with Asian American and Pacific Islander immigrants today, especially light-skinned East Asians. However, the ideology that the “correct” way of being an immigrant/minority is assimilating into white American culture is also one that has shaped the experiences of many other immigrant groups — including Irish Americans.
Irish Assimilation into White Supremacy
In the 19th Century and into the early Twentieth Century, Irish American immigrants experienced intense discrimination and marginalization. The infamous “No Irish Need Apply” signs are often trotted out by Irish Americans to show their own history of marginalization. While there are ongoing debates about the extent of anti-Irish discrimination in America, it’s undeniable that it did affect many people. But in one of white supremacy’s crueler tricks, many Irish Americans adopted racist views towards other ethnic/racial minorities and immigrants in order to prop up their own whiteness. Rather than understand a shared system of oppression, Irish Americans climbed the rungs of American society by pushing other people down. This was exemplified by their racism against Black Americans whom they saw as competing for their labor, which still influences anti-Blackness in Irish communities today.
It’s also sad that Irish immigrants bought into this oppressive system because many of the reasons Irish immigrants were coming to America was related to their own history of colonial exploitation and oppression. The history of Ireland is one of cultural eradication and exploitation by colonial British rule as well as by the Catholic church. I find it highly ironic that Irish heritage is now tied to a Catholic Saint, St. Patrick, who was responsible for suppressing Celtic culture and Irish paganism beliefs (including belief in those cute little faery Leprechauns). The Catholic church also is responsible for historic eradication of LGBTQ people, and while few detailed accounts of gender roles in pre-Christian Irish culture remains, there is evidence that gender non-conformity was far more accepted before Catholicism was coercively adopted. I was given a Catholic saint’s name at birth, but I purposely changed it to a Gaelic/Celtic chosen name. My first name Kayley is similar to the word céilidh in Irish Gaelic, referencing a dance/gathering with Celtic origins which may have historically involved gender non-conforming practices/expression.
To return to America in 19th/20th Centuries, Irish immigrants were also the perfect targets for “model minority” American racist propaganda. By assimilating and adopting dominant white culture, they could be seen as “good” Americans, as opposed to say, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) immigrants who still retained much of their culture and would never fully be seen as white. In 1882, when the United States passed the Chinese Exclusion Act barring all Chinese immigrants, over 50,000 Irish immigrants were still legally immigrating to America each year.
While today Chinese Americans are often seen as “model minorities,” in much of U.S. history they were seen as vastly inferior, and even dangerous, compared to other immigrants. Gradually Irish-ness was incorporated into dominant white-ness, especially as Irish Americans succeeded in ways that followed the “model minority” norm and adopted white supremacist beliefs themselves.
The story of my father’s Irish immigrant family sadly follows this paradigm, and is why I rarely talk about my Irish heritage. Yet especially with the rise of racist violence, including yesterday’s attacks in Atlanta on Asian American women, I feel it necessary to speak out. And as I’ll explore, I do find certain aspects of Irish heritage inspiring, especially the history of Irish artists and activists who fought colonial oppression. I hope exploring this helps others understand that Irish heritage is nuanced and worthy of study.
My Irish father’s own racism was in fact frequently directed at Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI). He seemed to derive inordinate glee from mocking AAPI immigrants whom he saw as not “assimilating” according to the “model minority” myth his Irish family had internalized. He would mimic and mock their way of speaking, squinting his eyes and singing “I think I’m turning Japanese” from the song by the Vapors. He had a wide vocabulary of racial epithets, frequently called AAPI cultural practices “barbaric,” and made fun of their food, often refusing to eat in AAPI-owned restaurants. When I became close to a Bangladeshi American friend in Elementary School with a typical Bengali name, I was lectured about how I should instead have friends with “American Names.”
American Imperialism in Asia-Pacific
My father’s virulent anti-AAPI racism was also driven by the de-humanizing indoctrination he received after being drafted during the American war in Vietnam (and Laos and Cambodia). He eventually was stationed as a military police officer in South Korea, enforcing our country’s own Cold War imperialist interests there, while other Americans fought a war to protect American imperial interests in Southeast Asia. American imperialism in Asia has also included our military incursions into the Philippines, and continued presence there. This includes my maternal grandfather serving in the Philippines during World War II. This imperial history has also led to the sexual exploitation of many Asian and Pacific Islander women and LGBT people, including sex workers. The military has typically turned a blind eye to this violence and sexual exploitation, even indoctrinating soldiers during Vietnam by teaching them to use dehumanizing terms tied to sex work for API women.
The military’s ongoing complicity in exploitation and violence against API sex workers briefly made headlines in 2014 when Filipina transgender woman Jennifer Laude, a sex worker, was murdered by a U.S. Marine. Yet in 2015 the perpetrator was pardoned for the murder. This international exploitation of API sex workers mirrors their exploitation here in America as immigrants, and is tied to the murders this week.
The history of American imperialism in Asia/Pacific, and my family’s own involvement in it, is one I’ve personally tried to explore and unpack while living in Southeast Asia, including Vietnam and the Philippines, and continuing to study Southeast Asian history as well as both the Vietnamese and Thai languages. This is a subject I will return to, including in planned future visits to Southeast Asia. But for here, suffice it to say that white supremacy and American imperialism go hand-in-hand, and Irish Americans like my father (and maternal grandfather) are part of that history. I feel personally responsible to try to come to terms with it and rectify it.
America has directly caused many of the economic and political conditions that have led many Asian and Pacific Islander populations to immigrate to America. Americans, including Irish Americans, then subject those same AAPI immigrants to dehumanizing practices, demanding they adhere to the “model minority” myth and reject their own culture. Those AAPI immigrants who don’t conform are frequently subjected to harassment, discrimination, and violence, which can turn homicidal, as we saw in Georgia yesterday.
Profiling and Violence Against Asian/Pacific Islander Sex Workers
Yesterday’s murders of six Asian women and two other massage parlor workers in Georgia by a white man were also an example of not only racism and xenophobia, but also a specific form of misogyny experienced by Asian/Pacific Islander (API) women at the hands of white men in America and abroad. The women who were targeted were specifically chosen based on pre-existing dehumanizing stereotypes about sex workers and API women. These beliefs lead to many API women frequently being targeted by violence and profiled as sex workers. For those API people who are actually sex workers, that is still absolutely no excuse for violence (and I believe sex work should be legalized). Violence against and violent policing of API sex workers is a systemic problem in America that many AAPI people have spoken out against. This includes the organization Red Canary Song, a grassroots collective of Asian sex workers & allies for migrant justice who also organizes Chinese American massage parlor workers.
My Latinx Heritage and Model Minority Pressure
While I’ve focused on anti-AAPI sentiment, especially based on the recent murders and my father’s particularly virulent anti-AAPI animosity, I’d like to briefly reflect on my experience of being both Irish and Latinx. Both of my parents had families that adhered to ideologies related to model minority pressure. My mother was sent to a Catholic school in a white (Irish/Italian) neighborhood, encouraged to speak English, and celebrated American holidays with only slight Latinx touches in a nuclear family setting. Yet she was still taught to be proud of where she came from, that her Guatemalan mother and Puerto Rican father were fortunate to have achieved material success, but that didn’t mean she should look down on others. I have a good relationship with my mother, and we’ve discussed that I am in a unique position to re-claim some of my Latinx heritage in visible ways, such as activism, that may have made my mother and/or her family a target for discrimination and violence.
Yet while my mother’s family, for better or worse, believed in the value of trying to blend in, my father’s family embraced the form of white supremacy common in Irish immigrants which I’ve explored earlier. These white supremacist beliefs led my father to try to eradicate any traces of Latinx identity and culture from my mother as well as myself. He would attempt to cut off and control all contact with my mother’s parents and extended family, mock and ridicule her for speaking Spanish, as well as mock and use racial epithets against other Latinx people. He would also implicitly and explicitly demand that I act/think/look white and discourage my Spanish language learning. In essence, he violently enforced the racist model minority myth on my mother and me, and led to me experiencing internalized oppression and self-hate for being Latinx.
As a result of these racist actions, it took me many years to even begin to re-claim any sense of pride in my Latinx heritage. I’ve written and spoken about that struggle against internalized oppression many times, including in a keynote speech at the 2017 Creating Change Conference. My main way of re-claiming that history has been doing activism alongside other Latinx people, and writing about Latinx advocates like Laya Monarez and my grandfather Frederico Torres-Saras. I’m proud to be part of the TransLatin@ Coalition, to serve alongside trans Latinx leaders on the Trans United Fund board, and to represent Latinx neurodivergent folks on the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network board.
But extricating the racism of my father’s family from my Irish heritage, and making being Irish something I could actually celebrate, has been an even longer journey. Yet one thing that ties both parts of my ethnic/racial identity together is that both Latin America and Ireland have a history of resisting colonial/imperial oppression. It’s in studying the historic struggles of the peoples of Ireland against colonialism and imperialism that has given me some sense of pride in Irish heritage.
Historic Irish Resistance to Oppression
What inspires me most about Irish heritage is those who took up the struggle of Irish liberation from both British colonialism and the stranglehold of the Catholic church. I’m inspired not just by activists, but also writers, poets, folklorists, and linguists who worked to re-claim and re-invigorate interest in distinctly Irish art and culture, including the Gaelic language and Celtic paganism. I was a literature major in college, and two of the most important figures to me were WB Yeats and James Joyce. Both had very different ideologies, spiritual beliefs, and artistic styles, but both in their own way used art to inspire Irish liberation from colonialism, including in dialogue with each other’s works.
In James Joyce’s Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus sums up oppression and colonialism in a brilliant phrase “It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant.” This metaphor gets at the essence of internalized oppression, the nearly-unshakable sense of inferiority to those in power which makes it so hard for marginalized people to see themselves as worthy of dignity, respect, and equal rights. When we are marginalized, we always feel our identity and/or our culture is inferior to the dominant culture, that we always look at ourselves as broken, as cracked. When we are literally looking into the mirror, we can’t help but see the ways we are not white, not cisgender, not male, etc. Ultimately, Ulysses is a book about opposing oppression. Ulysses, as well as Joyce’s other works, explore the contemporary Irish liberation movement through allusion to history, mythology, Catholic theology, and the English literary canon. And as Joyce’s writings explore the way Irish people have been robbed of their culture, sense of dignity, and independence by both Catholicism and Britain, they also explore oppression in many other contexts.
In one of my summer breaks in high school, I read both Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses back-to-back because I was drawn in by how well Joyce articulated feelings I had then of feeling trapped by my culture, my family, gender norms, my Catholic faith, and society as a whole. It led me down a rabbit hole of self-study in philosophy and literature that led me to building a sense of personal liberation. Joyce helped me reject Catholicism and adopt a secular humanist belief system opposed to all forms of oppression. Joyce also helped me begin to untangle my struggles with my LGBTQ identity and being multi-ethnic/multi-racial. Years later at Swarthmore college, as I began to more openly explore my queer and transgender identity, I happened upon a zine series in the Swarthmore Queer Union library called Portrait of the Artist as a Young Trans Woman. I realized I wasn’t the only one trans person who owed Joyce a major debt. My second time reading Ulysses was in a course on Joyce/Faulkner/Proust, and I wrote a thirty-page treatise exploring themes of sex work and transgender and queer identity/expression in the Circe chapter of Ulysses as well as in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. I will spare you the details of that paper, but I was rather surprised when my rather old-school white, cisgender, straight male professor said my paper was “one of the best analyses he’d ever read” on the Circe chapter (I still have my paper with his marks).
To return to Yeats, his poetry and life spoke to me in spiritual ways that I felt invigorating (even as an atheist). Coming a bit before Joyce, he was a leader of the “Irish Literary Revival,” which helped Irish people to stop seeing their cultural practices as inferior such as through re-invigorating interest in the Gaelic language, as well as mysticism and pagan practices. Recently I’ve been quite interested in exploring Irish mythology and specifically the way faerie beliefs were historically used to explain disability. In doing that research, the influence of Yeats is ubiquitous, as he had an animist spirituality which included faerie beliefs. His poem “The Stolen Child,” is a reference to the changeling myth that attempted to explain why certain children were disabled through a belief they were actually faeries swapped for human children.
This research into Irish folklore beliefs has been my own way to feel excited by aspects of my heritage in new and surprising ways, even if the changeling mythology is dark and ableist. It’s involved me looking into contemporary pagan practices and faerie beliefs, and interviewing practitioners about why they draw inspiration from pre-Christian Irish beliefs. Honestly, I enjoy secular aspects of pagan-inspired ritual, especially when utilized to counter oppression. Recently I published a post on the Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network blog about how Irish faerie beliefs still influence our understandings of autism and disability today. And by the end of 2021 I’ll have another essay published in a Disability Studies anthology referencing Irish folk beliefs in changelings, and the role contemporary secular ritual practices can help disabled people re-claim these harmful myths.
Irish Americans and Racial Justice Solidarity
It is now fast approaching midnight, and unlike many Irish Americans on St.Patrick’s Day(cringe), I’ve spent my night looking inward and reflecting on Irish heritage rather than an outward celebration of that heritage. Because of the long history of Irish immigrants in America often embracing racist and white supremacist ideologies, I’m not comfortable at such gatherings. Irish Americans in particular have much to atone for, and we need to examine and dis-arm the ways we continue to benefit from white supremacy and harmful ideologies such as the model minority myth.
It is especially important to reflect on this racial privilege in the wake of the violent murders of six Asian women in Georgia this week, who were victims of white supremacy and the model minority myth. Yes, Irish Americans did face historic persecution, and Ireland has its own history of colonial oppression. There are inspiring Irish people who have dedicated themselves to collective liberation. But the reality is, in the United States today, Irish Americans experience racial and cultural privileges from white supremacy in ways that other immigrant communities and racial/ethnic minorities never have been able to achieve. So this is a call for others of Irish heritage to work towards racial justice and immigrant justice. We must actively oppose white supremacy, American imperialism, and all the systems of oppression that Irish Americans for too long have been complicit in.
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